Noah Shenker
(shenker@usc.edu)
I am a doctoral candidate in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California
School of Cinematic Arts and the recipient of numerous fellowships including a USC
Annenberg Graduate Fellowship and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship in Archival
Research from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Below is a description of
my graduate research on issues of Holocaust testimony and trauma. If you would like to
contact me regarding your interest in this field of scholarship or your experiences
working with Holocaust survivors and how that might intersect with my research, you
may reach me at the email listed above.
My dissertation Embodied Memory: The Institutional and Cultural Practices of
Holocaust Testimony explores how audiovisual recordings of interviews with Holocaust
survivors are preserved for interrelated purposes of commemoration, education, and
social action, across archives and museums in the United States.
In recent decades, archivists, curators, and academics have faced a changing landscape in
Holocaust commemoration marked by an increasing absence of living survivors but a
growing presence of their recorded and archived stories. While scholars and cultural
critics have paid significant attention to the vast number of archived Holocaust
testimonies, there has been far less focus on how those recordings have been shaped by
individual, institutional, and formal practices.
With that in mind, my research moves beyond considerations of Holocaust testimonies as
raw or unmediated sources by examining them in terms of their media specificity and the
ways they are structured and embodied by particular institutional mandates, preferences,
and policies. Ultimately, I argue that this analytical approach helps inform strategies for
transmitting testimony in pedagogically, socially, and ethically constructive ways. This
issue is increasingly pressing as museums and archives attempt to harness testimonies to
interventionist ends, including efforts to merge Holocaust commemoration with
campaigns to address contemporary genocides in places like Darfur.
Central to my work is an engagement with scholarship exploring the ethical dynamic of
testimony, with the underlying notion that when survivors share their stories, it
constitutes an act of committing both themselves and their accounts to others, who in turn
bear witness to the act of witnessing. However, I build on that line of inquiry through an
exploration of how testimonies are shaped by institutions and their respective histories.
How do archives and museums foster an ethical encounter between interviewer,
interviewee, and spectator across a changing landscape of archival and exhibition
formats? In what ways can archived testimonies of the Holocaust be socially
transformative by training how we engage trauma and the suffering of others? These and
other questions are the subject of my research.